This was a very inspiring talk.  Not so much because of the content of the talk itself (though it was quite cool, and seeing a bit of Spore was great) but because it really got me thinking about the future of networked games, how we are really at a nexus of redefining what it means to be a multiplayer game.  There is this huge cloud of players and hardware out there and it is a new frontier, still largely undiscovered, to figure out what kind of gameplay that can facilitate.

 

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Spore: Pollenating the Universe: User-generated content in Spore

Caryl Shaw

 

Shipping Sept 7 in US (2 days earlier in Europe). 

 

In the past… we thought…  sharing would be 100% under the hood, little visibility except on the website.  Aesthetic matching system, limited control.

 

That was working (made block city all by itself!), but one day a light went off… team was making a lot of really cool stuff.  What we wanted to do was organize it.  “Sporepedia” – a front end to all that content pollination stuff.

 

So now:  encourage content discovery, reward achievements, expose the best stuff, and give the player the ability to manage their content.

 

Seeing new creature, get a sporepedia card for it.  Achievements to encourage re-playability.  Modeled after Xbox Live.  Comparing yourself to your buddies is good too. 

 

“Quality” age, event count, average user rating from that creator, feed count (Sporecasts).  Actual peer rating is just one metric among many. 

 

“Power to the people” – let players control their own landscape.  Ban stuff you don’t like. 

 

Browsable, searchable, sortable.  “Buddies only” filter. 

 

Spore webpage (MySpore) – info, buddies, widgets.  Myspace + Spore.  Take your spore stuff to Facebook.  MySpore page in the game as well, webpage delivered from server integrated into the game.  Do these social / content tasks without having to leave the game to go to the web.

 

Social Networking in Spore – asset tagging , in-game comment system.  In-game storytelling.  Upload to YouTube. 

 

Comic book creation software, t-shirt / mug printing, 3d prints.

 

EA login system not user friendly, so put the guts of it into Spore rather than a direct port. 

 

Jump in at any time period, don’t just have to start out with micro-organism.  All editors unlocked from the start. 

 

Cool skeleton creature creation editor tool.  Animated, dynamic.  Nice touches about where you put eyes doing the “right thing”. 

 

“Theme sets” in Sporepedia.  Paint creature like a Gamecube (from a Gamecube UFO). 

 

“Test drive” mode, just walk a creature around in the editor.  Want players to feel connected to their content.

 

Direct upload to YouTube (or just save the AVI locally).  Email postcards to friends.  Capture animated avatar.

 

Sporepedia allows “test drive” to decide whether you want to add stuff to your world.  Some creatures are “published”.  You can publish music as well.  All the content is a PNG file, you can email it to someone and they can just drag and drop it in.  About 30k.  Can also generate a higher res version. 

 

Epic Asparagus = fun.

 

Spore Store.    Offer pre-orders, advanced versions of things, platform versions, etc.  Advertising in game without player leaving.  Buy t-shirts with your creatures.

 

Game shows a preference for getting stuff from your buddies.

 

“Sporecasts” – themed groupings of content that anyone can make or subscribe to.  People wanted to aggregate content by theme in Sims 2, learned lesson from that.    Set a Sporecast as a theme to seed a lot of content in your game initially. 

 

Not allowing users to share music files on the server for copyright issues.  Helps the fansites, who can be the avenue for sharing that content. 

 

Q:  “SporeDSCast”?  Content shareable between platforms?  Not between DS and PC.  DS version is just the creature game with a paper-art style.  Once other platforms are there we want to explore sharing between those versions.   Mac and Windows can share.

 

Q:  Concerns about being too easy to populate?  Too much content to manage?  Quality mechanisms will help manage that automatically.  Cull information from that – not keeping content that no one is using, delete it ff the server.

 

Always can create something new, or can choose from Sporepedia. 

 

Aesthetic matching is good tech – “get more like this”. 

 

Interactive music editor.  Brian Eno worked on this (as well as procedural music).  Pick a back beat, add in ambient sounds and then create an anthem with specific notes.  Save out to Sporepedia. 

 

Using Atom (new form of RSS) for a lot of this stuff, so expect to support an ecosystem around that content.

I didn't take notes during this because it was quite dark, crowded, and loud, with more video than talk content really.  But it was still a lot of fun.  The "flag waving" quotient was a little higher than usual, at times coming across more like an E3 presentation than a GDC one -- but to be honest I kind of liked that.  It was neat seeing Fable 2 and Ninja Gaiden 2 in action.

But the real news was the announcement of XNA games on Marketplace, IMO.  If MS can pull this off I think it has a lot of potential to be disruptive to the industry, in a very good way.  I've been playing around with XNA a bunch in my spare time and it is a very nice core toolset.  This announcement really makes me want to go polish up a few little game ideas and actually get them out there.

I could have lived without the goofy Gears 2 announcement though... after all that hype they at least should have showed something about the actual game...

I'm probably not doing this talk a lot of justice, since to be honest I had a bit of a hard time understanding the speakers and the slides whizzed by sometimes.  Naughty Dog folks clearly do some serious tech crunching though.  :)  Too bad they still think LISP is cool.... shudder...

 

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The Technology of Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune

Christophe Balestra & Pal-Kristian Engstad

Naughty Dog

 

Codename “Big”.   3 yr project.  10 people on 12 month prepro.  70 people by the end, +5 contractors.  6 design, 18 programmers, approx 50 artists.

 

Started the project with zero lines of code.   Old internal programming language, transition to C++.  Work quickly on shaders with experience from PS2 tech.  Prototyped shaders on PC.  Animation was priority #1.   Also started tools over from scratch.  Over-designed first set of tools.  Extend what you have vs changing pipeline completely.   Tools not stable = not good, unhappy artists.

 

Tools:  Keep them simple!  People will actually use the tools this way.  Have a few tools rather than a centralized uber-tool.  Easier to expand one tool among several than a huge one.  Expanding your current set of tools.

 

Cygwin:  Like a linux shell.  Helps controlling people’s environment.  All tools must be run from cygwin. 

 

BAM: Asset manager.  Everything is always “live”, don’t want people isolated.  If there is a problem, just fix it.  Check-out, check-in, but no sync!  Every checkin is automatically propagated without any explicit step.  If something wrong happens, probably something wrong with the tool, so fix it immediately.  Linux server, using symlinks.   All data on the network.

 

BuildBig:  GUI tool to describe what actors and levels are made of.  Actor made of skeleton + animations.  Level = static geometry.  Everything stored in MySQL, ok at first but then changelists killed it – bad idea.  Switched to text files and Perforce. 

 

BA / BL – simple command line tools.  Build Actors / Build Levels.  Compression, format conversion for BA.  BL generates the lighting files and other processing.  Express stats on assets for artists.  Help artists determine efficiency of mesh / SPU conversion. 

 

Visibility:  During BL a PVS is pre-computed per level.  Render the level with OpenGL from sample points.  Tree, each cell contains sample points.  Computed once a day and re-used caches. 

 

Distributed Build:  Using ND internal distributed system.  Very simple, runs command line tools.  Output stored in MySQL.  So scripts call the executables to distribute to the work. 

 

Shaders:  Uber-shader file.  Use #define to build features.   Not great for dependencies, lots of shader recompilation.  Mitigated by distributed build system.  Shaders compiled during BA/BL process.  Each actor level contains its own shader code.

 

Material Editor:  GUI tool connected to Maya to create shaders.  Select .fx file, choose features.  Artists loved it but it was not very stable.  Next version will connect directly to the game. 

 

Charter:  Maya too slow, so created GUI tool to create game-play contents.  Regions, Nav-meshes, spawners, cover points.  Quick iteration time.  5 seconds between editor and game. 

 

Remember, building good GUIs is hard, you can’t just put your junior programmers on it.

 

DC: Data Compiler.  LISP based, used originally to define data structures.  Added scripting to it.  Render settings, AI, animation trees, region scripts.  Realtime linking for fast iteration. 

 

Static lighting: Global Illumination.  Direct color, indirect color, direction per vertex.  Blend realtime shadows with this static lighting.  Moving objects used light probes & SH.  Objects look around and pick the closest one.  Convert SH to cubemap (via SPU).  Not texture bound.  Biggest problem: Too slow, and couldn’t be distributed.

 

TAME: GUI tool for managing text localization.  Very important, very helpful!  Producers in Europe and Japan can manage everything independently.

 

Fileserver: We love Linux, Linux is fast.  Game connects to our own file system running under linux using the PS3 debug port.  80 MB / sec.  Cached files to devkit.

 

Programmer Pipeline:  Linux again.  1 Linux box for every 2 programmers.  Use putty to connect to it.  Fast, multithreaded build. SN Debugger.

 

Artist Pipeline:  Maya & ZBrush.  Material Editor, BuildBig, BA/BL.

 

Designers:  Charter, BuildBig, BA/BL, DC

 

86 MB level loading heap.  8 megs for mesh processing, stolen from movie memory.  2 MB water  memory.  5 MB of script memory, 4 MB for sound memory.

 

FIOS:  All IO done with FIOS.  Everything compressed with Edge.  Stream a lot and all the time: levels, actors, sounds, music, textures.  Never read data off directly, everything is precached via HD.  Want to maintain audio and overlap with gameplay. 

 

Loading Scheme:  Levels and actors are .pak files, made of 512k pages.  Heap of 172 pages.  No fragmentation.  Did suck to use a 512k page for a 100k asset.  So there was some page relocation at runtime. 

 

Texture Streaming:  HD on every PS3 is *huge*.  Very easy to do, 3 days of work.  Adds a lot to the quality of the game.  Everyone must stream textures!  Defragment memory every frame.  Move up to 16 MB per frame.  Simple collapsing mechanism, just move each block forward.  Maximize 120 MB texture usage.  Needed a 20 MB buffer to seed loading of next level. 

 

Collisions:  Sphere, convex polytope, capsule.  Wrote their own system.  Concave geometry, kd-tree Polygon soup.  SPU elf per shape.  32 objects per batch.  ~ 500 asynch ray casts every frame.

 

Physics:  Split world into “islands”.  One SPU job (solver) per island.  Successive Relaxation LCP solver.  General constraint system: rag-doll motion animation.  Anim generated in Maya then extract parameters for ragdoll.

 

SPUS:  lots of stuff.  Scene traversal, water, decompression, particles, etc.  Using only 30% of SPUs.

 

Animation:  Using SPUs to decompress and blend animation tree.  Blend tree with up to 25 animations, use DC to describe animation states.  Layered animation system (running + weighted shooting, etc.)

 

Scene Traversal:  Visible frustrum culling, PVS lookup, sorting, render setup, mesh processing setup.  Sorting and setup on the PPU, everything else on SPU.  Goal to get everything independently on the SPUs.

 

Mesh Processing:  SPUs to offload RSX.  Decompression, skinning, backface culling. Also collision with rendered geometry: decals, IK.  Get exact positions. 

 

Scene Rendering:  5 phases: Shadows, dynamic lighting, opaque geom, alpha blend geom, post processing effects.

 

Sunlight Shadow:  Tried many solutions, but all had problems.  Idea from Killzone:  Reduce flickering: fixed world space sample points.  Shimmering caused from slight differences in maps due to movement, so wanted to fix that.  So use stable grid, just scroll around on it.  SSM: orthographic shadow map.  How to determine resolution?  Cascaded shadow maps. 

 

Shadow blockers > shadow pass > depth buffer

Opaque geom. pass

 

Dynamic lighting:  Render opaque dyn lit geom..  Generate world normal and specular exponent in screen space.  Divide screen into a grid, and then figure out which lights interact those.  Render quads over those and accumulate light.  Do everything in screen space! 

 

Opaque rendering:  easy, shadows and lights already done.  Just have to do materials.  Output is HDR.

 

Alpha-blended geometry (water).  Uses color buffer, water mesh, shadow depth.  Reflection rendered in separate pass, used as texture.

 

Particles:  Sim and render setup done on SPUs.  Wrote specific shaders for each particle.  Switch to sample buffer if framerate spikes.

 

Lots of post effects.  Blur, DoF, tonemap, saturate, distortion.  Adds a lot to the game!

 

Try to keep it as simple as possible.

 

Here I am at GDC, back after a hiatus of a few years.  I'll be posting my session notes during the conference.  As I mentioned from the DICE notes, these are just more or less my raw train-of-though transcription of my takeaway from people's talks.  So I apologize if they aren't very coherent, but since I was writing them up for my own benefit anyways I figured I'd post them.  Sadly I can't post them in realtime throughout the day like I could at DICE because GDC is too chintzy to provide wireless coverage.

 

Seeing Ken's talk this morning really made me want to go back and play Bioshock again.  Maybe I'll try it with the new "no vita chamber" option and make a run on all the Achievements...

 

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Storytelling in Bioshock: Empowering Players to Care about your Stupid Story

Ken Levine, Boston 2K

 

Bad news is: nobody cares about that story you’ve been working on since 5^th grade.  But the audience is not your mom.  They have no reason to be predisposed to your work. 

 

So how do we do it?  Details may seem like the important part but they are not your friend.  Details suck, and more details suck more.

 

The world is the best narrator!  It’s the thing we render best.  Starting to get there with character but still a long way off, world is nearly 100% authentic.  What is the player engaged in, and engaged in at his own pace?  The world. 

 

Most games: warehouses & sewers.  So many missed opportunities to give player narrative.

 

In world story: didn’t happen overnight.  Vision demo from ’05, reasonably detailed but not telling much.  What is it saying about the world of Rapture?  Not very much.  Prototype is a good way to make the team hate you – making a judgment on what everyone poured their hearts and souls into.  Decided to scrap it and start again. 

 

As time went on, we made our story simpler.  Counterintuitive?  Compared to job of a sculptor?  Problem with our job is first we have to make the giant stone in the first place.  After so much work it is painful to chip away.  Started with dozens of characters, 70 years, love triangles, civil wars.  It was a mess.  Maybe it could have been a (bad) novel but your tools for communicating in a game are actually quite limited.  So:  who are your main characters and what do they want?  Storytelling 101.

 

“Character Massacre of 2006”.  Combined / wiped major characters.  1 character = 1 idea.  Diane McClintock – not her story, but a tool to tell the gamer what happened in the civil war.  She’s the only one who tells that story.  Other character / ideas: Ryan’s Conscience, Impact on the Little People. 

 

Push vs Pull: What is the purpose of a cutscene?  To push information to a player and you want them to see all of it.  Same about other linear media like movies.  That’s not our advantage, not our strengths.  We have the ability to let people pull information to them.  Why is this better?  Aren’t they going to miss that?  Yeah.  They may miss it, even a lot of it.  You have to accept that.  That’s ok: the people who engage will be passionate about that stuff because they were engaged in the decision.  Player has the option to “opt out” – not interested, we aren’t going to force it on them. 

 

“3 levels of story”:  Most of us devs are so far away from the experience that average players have.  “Spring Oreos” – not our space.  A lot of people just aren’t going to care.  3 levels: what do I basically need to do / kill / go.  Most basic level.  Sales numbers reflect hitting those people.  Otherwise you make those “beloved” games that don’t move more than 150k units.  Second level – basic information about characters, vaguely follow along.  The final level is the really hardcore fan who is into it, the game equivalent of writing the Nirvana lyrics in your notebook in 5^th grade.  We want to support that, it’s there, but it can’t get in the way of the guy who just wants to play Madden and Halo.

 

Narrative Vehicles exclusive to games.  Aren’t cutscenes good?  Yes, but where are going, towards more cutscenes or more interactivity?  Future is clear, interactivity.  Audio logs: good opt in / out tools.  Sounds of rapture: the PSAs. 

 

Don’t Do What You Can’t Do:  System Shock 2 – constrained to a spaceship.  Games have limitations, they are not the real world.  Breaks suspension of disbelief if they do something that doesn’t work.  All those doors mysteriously locked in a linear corridor shooter.  Takes the player out of the game.  Underwater city in Bioshock, a constrained environment.  Lot of people are dead – easier to interactive with.  If you can’t do something well, don’t do it, and real people fall into this.  Anything that opens the curtain to see the wizard of Oz causes problems.   Period was both familiar and new.  Rapture more believable than a lot of game spaces despite its fantasy nature.   Can be alienating to have no frame of reference, period piece nature helped with that.  Sci-fi movies: earthling to alien world, or alien to earth, but never an alien on an alien world.

 

Bioshock’s Plot Gets Simple:  If you want people to follow it, it has to be really really simple.  Escape Rapture, Kill Ryan, Kill Fontaine.  If the player knows what he’s doing he’ll go with you to a lot of strange places.  Indiana Jones: in every scene he’s looking for the Ark.  Scene in the tent with Marion – really makes that point.  Why so many accents in Bioshock?  Simple: wanted to make it clear who was talking everytime you hear them. 

 

Bioshock is a detective story.  Traditional stories of this are interactive: “whodunit”?  Natural fit for games as a result.  Come down to a mysterious place, everyone is dead: what happened?  Graphical capabilities give us the ability to have wheat & chaff.  Back in the Doom days you could only have the wheat: monsters & weapons.  Now this power lets us have a lot of density in the world, put in all that detail so the player can try and find what is important.  Clue isn’t a game with only one suspect.  Reward the really observant player on that third level of investment.  “Moira and Patrick” – clues hidden in the world.

 

Narrative vs Story: what is the difference.  Story is what you tell, narrative is what they choose to have told to them.  2 most important: Little Sisters & Plasmids – what you do to your body, what you do to the children.  Also most important to gameplay.  Player can participate in these story elements and get much more engaged.  Getting people to understand the girl / father relationship was key in getting them to understand the gameplay and the narrative.  We were surprised about the empathy with the big daddies, not wanting to hurt them.

 

“Mise En Scene”.  To present a scene.  Telling story without words.  Dr Steinman.  Don’t meet characters until after you’ve been hearing about them for quite a while.  When you finally meet him he’s a guy with a machine gun and a mask – but we set him up in the world and hearing what he did to get people to invest much more in the character. Sander Cohen: by the time you meet him you already have a relationship.

 

Mystery: Don’t tell players what is going on in your world.  Answering questions is not as interesting as asking them.  Ambiguity.  From the very beginning: who am I?  Where am I?  Don’t answer those right away.  Lost / Cloverfield.  Godzilla with less information, reinvented the genre.  The Ring – is the end reveal that interesting?  But the mystery is powerful.  “Mystery balloon” – half filled balloon slowly rising, need to tap it up again – but not too far.  Constant balance.  Last act in Bioshock really suffered.  Gameplay was good but the mysteries were gone once the question about identity and Ryan was answered – balloon hit bottom.    Who killed Laura Palmer – what is left after you answer that?

 

Opening of Bioshock:  No stentorian narrator with 50 proper nouns and words with apostrophes.  Ask, don’t answer.  Lots of mystery.  Robinson Crusoe – the castaway – so familiar. 

 

Original Little Sister: a slug like gatherer.  No ability to emote, or relate.  Original prototype about a huge simulation, but who cares?  It is about the players perception.  Version 2 a weird ugly midget thing.  Then dog in a wheelchair.   Then sad mutant girl.  Then to the little sister from the final game.  Gameplay function didn’t change but the narrative notion changed, audience ability to relate to it evolved.

 

Story gelled late: 8 months before ship.  Games are complicated to build.  In defense of storytelling coming late.  Evolved over years.  Learning from the game itself – have the game tell the designer the story, not just the other way around.  Being involved with level reviews and art direction.  This generated a lot of ideas.  Triggered excitement and wanted to add more to the game.  Inspired to write the Gatherer’s Garden on the spot.  If you expect writing to be thrown over the fence a year head of time you’re not going to integrate the gameplay and story.  If one thing made it what it is, it was the luxury to make those changes late in the game.  Everyone knows you make balance changes late, story is the same.  Tough – downstream effects of this – but important.  Real costs to this model, big strain on production. 

 

Respect your Audience.

 

Trust Mystery.

 

Empower the Gamer.

 

Q: Hard to do humans.  What about Alyx in HL?  Well, it’s good to be Valve, they’ve advanced that technology really far.  But even they have realized Alyx breaks at some point – you shoot her, she gets stuck.  An impossibly hard problem.   Levine’s approach: if you do it, do it 100%.

 

Q: How important was the graphics design and identity of the world?  Very important, the first thing people react to are the visuals.  Same but different.  Unique in the videogame space. 

 

Q: I didn’t want to kill Andrew Ryan.  Narratives – are we doomed to making games to make plot devices to clean up lack of choice?  Games are essentially very linear things – outside of combat and physics things are pretty deterministic.  One plot at Irrational because it’s hard to just do even one – hats off to the Bioware guys.  Maybe dynamically generated narrative happens in the future but that’s a challenge way outside of the game space – AI research.

 

Q:  Single player FPS.  What about multiplayer?  Co-op?  Marketing wanted to make the main character important.  Who do you play in the game, what is the identity?  Created a plot twist of having a cipher.  Bioshock + coop would be a strange mix.  Plan for that from the beginning.  Resistance 2 – co-op mode separate.  Loathe to throw it in if it is going to be compromised.

 

Q:  What guidance to the mission teams before than final 8 months where the story gelled?  You have to come up with a bunch of things to get them going.  General stuff – forest, mad doctor.  The stuff that evolves is the details that fill in later.  So those story changes didn’t change the missions.  Thousand stories can represent a given mission flow.  Changes there were from gameplay, not story.  Story has as many bugs as any other part of the process.

 

Q: Most games don’t have a moral element, where did this come from?  Thinking about little sister, capitalism unrestrained.  Evolved rather than with a specific goal up front.

 

Q:  Traditional games centered around difficulty.  What role does this play in a game about story?  Should finish a game if you can.  Unlike a book there is difficulty.  Really want my grandmother to beat the game on Easy.  Gratified to see how many non-traditional gamers playing Bioshock.  Also want hardcore gamers too, which is what all the plasmids & world interaction is about.  Give the players a lot of choice.  Hardcore gamers more likely to go into options to set that, so default to experience for most players.

 

Q:  What influenced decision about how much info to have about the main character?  Started out really not thinking about that – that it didn’t matter.  Gordon Freeman – not in the character but in other character’s reactions.  Tried to turn this lack of thought into a strength.  At first didn’t even have the airplane crash – that came from a reaction from “hey, why am I in the water”.  Fill in the bare minimum about who this guys is, just enough to make those people happy.

 

Q:  When did the big “would you kindly” narrative twist take shape?  Early on knew we wanted an unreliable narrator.  Like in Fight Club, Usual Suspects.  Audience perception of events is not accurate, camera is misleading.  Took a while to figure out exactly how that would work, tied into who is the main character – not being anyone is a strength, that that is literally true – fake identity.  Playing with that expectation of not having control was a bit of a post-modern joke, then people actually expected for you to have that control afterwards!  Writing checks with the narrative that the gameplay couldn’t cash.  Rub people’s face in it – then just continued to rub their face in it.  Put in about a year ahead of ship. 

 

Q:  3 levels of narrative:  what if someone changes halfway through?  Lost does recap episodes, for example.  A tough problem – like an interactive help for the narrative.  Supporting that for a broad range seems very complex.  Didn’t seem too bad for Bioshock.  Lots of work to solve because of huge variability in player knowledge. 

Dear Mistwalker,

Please next time you make a gorgeous game with an interesting backstory and fairly decent tech, try not to ruin it with a first boss that is about 1000% harder than anything else in the game to that point and that can wipe your entire party out in one attack. 

Love,

Everyone who plays Lost Odyssey

The GTA IV official website recently went live.  Like the websites for the previous GTA games, it's a very effective teaser tool for the game -- excellent flash layout, lots of great content, and just exuding GTA style.  April 29th can't come any faster as far as I'm concerned.

It's a little big and messes up the layout, so I don't know if it'll stay, but check the crazy GTA IV flash widget off to the side.  I guess I'm showing my inexperience as a blogger but I just think the idea of these HTML embeddable widgets is a very cool development.  I'm in love with the idea that games can empower their rabid fanbase to become advocates for the game itself -- the evolution of good old word-of-mouth.  I love living here in the future!

 

Russ Crupnick

NPD

 

It’s 2:30 PM, do you know where your gamer is?

 

Music really caught up by changing formats.  Where are we going to wind up?

 

“Retail” games 19B vs Box office 10B, Music 11B, Home Video 24B.  50% of that is software.  Golden goose in home video.

 

Record shattering in 2007.  Last year was 13.5B.  Quite an explosion after flatline in early 2000s.  All categories benefited from growth.  We’re in a good place now, but where do we go from here.

 

Look at CDs… big decline from golden years of the CD in 1999 (15B in CDs alone).  CDs sold fell by 50% from a few years ago.  Digital Download is good, but doesn’t make up for lost CD sales.  Going to be even worse in 2008.  We don’t want to end up there.

 

Is it all about piracy?  Well, kind of.  Less than half the music we acquire is paid for.  60% is from borrowing and ripping or downloading p2p.  Digital substitution is a big deal.  How is our industry evolving?  If I can listen from streaming or buy a 99 cent track instead of an album, that is digital substitution.  Think about how to mitigate substitution for our industry.  Content drought is big too.  Is the music as good as it used to be?  We have to deal with the 90% of games that are crap.  Retailers will reduce space in response.   “Teen Spirit” – average teenager gets 80% of their music without paying.  What is the model to get teenagers back to paying for music?  Video game success is coming directly out of music industry.  Software up 41%, CDs down 45%.  On the other end, boomer contentment.  They buy 1/3 of the CDs but there is no marketing to them.  They have a collection and radio and that’s it. 

 

DVD packaged media – end of an era?  Peaked in 2006, from zero in 1997.  Flat box office – sequel satiation.  DVDs come from the original movies.  So that flattening carries through to the home video market.  DVD sales for 3^rd sequels down 50% from 2^nd sequel (Spiderman, Pirates, etc.).  How good will Halo 15 be?  Hi-Def formats confused the market.  Not really about the format war though, it’s about not understanding why this is better than DVD.  Digital is also trying to be relevant, at least the studios are experimenting here.  Time shifting – DVRs, streaming, portability.  This is very scary to big entertainment.  DVRs are going to eat into time spent a lot – that will double soon.  This could compete with gaming?

 

“Going from a game of checkers to a 3d chess game.”  Not a flat world in gaming now, multidimensional.  Gaming opportunity:  Only 56% doing it 2-3 times a week?  Who are the targets?  25% of Americans game daily or several times a week.  Frequent breaks male 65/35.  But occasional is 50/50 and non-gamers are 60/40 the other way.  Non-gamers are baby-boomers and older.  Gaming is really ubiquitous though, frequent gamers cut across all ages.

 

On what platforms?  63 on video game system, 30 on portable, 61 on computer.  Frequents do it on everything.  Occasional is not that far behind though.  16% gaming on a cellphone, and only 10% buying on cellphone.  If we want to be more frequent, capitalize on those devices.  Are those payment systems in place to buy games for cellphones?  Desire to play is greater than those actually exercising it with purchase.  That’s the magic of iTunes, lots of ways to have those transactions. 

 

Frequent and Occasionals pretty similar among technology interest groups (cutting edge, utility, etc.).  They really aren’t that different. 

 

“Stop calling us gamers”  -- Entergamers?  Happen to be heavy entertainment consumers and gaming is one piece of what they do.  60% of frequent gamers buy DVDs, 50% in music.  Likelihood of buying across categories is high.  Spend more than $3000 a year on basic entertainment.  Games are only 25% of that.  Similar purchasing amounts between frequent and occasional gamers too (HDTV purchase, DVR, etc.)  Same balance for use of social networking sites.  Almost half across both categories.  Virtual world visits are much higher though – 14 freq vs 4 occ.  Big spike about watching movies on a console for frequent gamers.  Console as media center, the pipe to the TV, could be a very big thing.   Music on video consoles?  11 freq.  Gaming as a vehicle for discovery and acquisition of music, not just listening.

 

Consumers and retailers are fickle.  24/7 battle.  Consistently superior content is key.  Try different distribution models.  Options are expanding and are eventually going to cut into gaming.  The core opportunity is the enthusiasm for entertainment.  But that makes it a fight for time.  Many more Americans should be gaming!

 

Mike Acton. Insomniac

Tools: Build or Buy?

 

Insomniac: you should invest and build your own engine technology.  It is an investment in your people. 

 

One argument: buying lets you spend more time on your gameplay.  But that is almost never true.  Instead of concentrating on core tech you concentrate on using someone else’s core tech.

 

Engines no longer a differentiator?  Become a commodity?  Not true if it hinders you.

 

Middleware games faster?  Insomniac builds their own tech but have 3 generations of games on the current console gen.  Same with Epic.  Silicon Knights will tell you about the speed of using middleware.

 

What about the costs?  Yes, it costs.  Strong team, smart people, and you have to invest in them.  But who would say that is a bad idea?  The hidden costs of middleware – product delay, unsupported platforms, losing the most qualified people to customize middleware because they can’t learn and grow?  Cost of support (and not getting enough of it).  What if that middleware company is working on their own game, can you depend on them?  Cost of lost opportunities with your game design.  People dependant on Renderware, and then it went away.  Cost of lost preparation – what are you going to do next generation?  Will your middleware vendor be ready for the next generation?

 

Isn’t this just Not Invented Here?  It’s not really.  It’s about responsibility.  Whose bottom line does it affect when the game is late or missing features?  Who do the media and players blame?  It isn’t going to be the middleware.  Rightfully so, it is your responsibility.  Only way to take that is to do the work yourself with a team that you have invested in.

 

We all use middleware to some extent:   Maya, grep, SDKs.  When do you choose, and how?  Invest internally anywhere that is of value to your product to be better than the average.

 

Andy Burke, Insomniac

Components

 

Look to middleware to lower cost and reduce risk.  People make a big mistake and believe that these tools will just drop in.  But they never do.  It may reduce but it never eliminates.  Always takes more investment than you think it will.

 

Anything you license: get the source.  At least gives you some recourse if problems arise.

 

Be realistic about cost savings.  Not going to come in and work perfectly with no problems.  In the end, all in one solutions work really well for the people that developed it, but how well will it work for your game?  That can work for you if you are making a substantially similar game.  3^rd person from 1^st person, sure maybe.  But a puzzle game?

 

As your game differs from the tech you license, cost is going to go up.  Think about how different your game is.  What is the cost to make the tech work the way you need it to.  In the end it is your own ship date that matters, so what is the impact on that.

 

At Insomniac, use a component approach to solve particular needs.  Being able to drop in something right where needed is nicer.  Easier to understand since they are more limited in scope.  Even with components it is not going to be free.  Develop ways to tie this in to your own systems.  View Maya as a component – a 3d modeling and animation component.  Tried to use it in a way that it wasn’t intended for – level construction and wiring – but it wasn’t designed for it.  Very costly to try and make it do that.  Costs to implement and then also lots of bugs.  As a component though, it is much nicer, though still has costs.   Custom importer to a private format, real time comms between Maya and our level construction tool (Luna) for real time manipulation but visualize in engine.  Of course, support.  In the end a much nicer solution though.

 

Perforce is another good example.  For a long time it was all in-house revision control.  Dedicated developer, with periodic assistance.  Hard to compete as a game company with something that is their entire business.  Does the job well.  Still takes time to integrate, and ongoing costs.  It’s not open source so you can’t fix a bug, you just have to find a workaround even with responsive support. 

 

wxWidgets.  Considered many options but decided too costly to develop internally.  Settled on wxWidgets but only after analysis and thinking about the costs.  It did take a while to integrate.  Fortunately was open source so could fix bugs but also then contribute those back to the community.

 

There is no single answer.  Work to understand what the impact will be – how similar the tech is to what you want to do, what are the ongoing costs.  Think about using smaller components to answer specific problems.  Get the source!

 

 

Michael Capps, Epic Games

Licensing Middleware

 

Started out licensing for America’s Army, using Unreal license.  So a client as well as the director of dev. 

 

Intentional separation of game team and engine team so they have to go through the same support mechanism.

 

Shared tech yields better games.  All about abstracting away details.  Avoid machine language, use Windows.  Middleware lets you not worry about platform details.

 

If you don’t have an engine, cost-savings argument is simple.  License for less than build, even amortized across multiple titles.   Content is the most expensive part of any next-gen game!  7x the content in UT3 vs UT99.  Content can start right away, you aren’t throwing stuff away.    Less engine tech revision.

 

Majority of dev teams already have free access to some engine tech.  Half of Epic’s customers fall into that category, of having tech but licensing UE3.  Why?  That tech needs modification for the next title, but so would an off-the-shelf engine.

 

Cost savings aren’t the only reasons to license!  Middleware is battle tested.  Shipping is where rubber hits the road.  Tons of testing on all platforms.  Testing all code pats.  “A 300 Warrior”.  Tough to get that benefit yourself.  More stable – ever cut a few corners during ship crunch?  Those cut corners go in a different branch.  Thousands of smart coders looking at this tech.  Tools and interface are the bread and butter.  More emphasis here.  When we show it to devs, coders don’t like it but the artists love it – that’s how they sell engines.  Good tools are double duty – selling engine + useful for internal games.  Big investment in automation that most devs can’t afford.  Better documented and support than internal tools.  Internal guys have games to ship.  Feature richness – you get features you’d love to have but wouldn’t build yourself.  More modern – long cycle of feature lock in normal dev but middleware never stops.   Better optimized – bigger your base technology is the more leverage there is to things like having nvidia make your engine fast.  As big as you are you are never as big as all the Unreal titles.  External teams like XDK use middleware as reference.

 

Not just engines, even when rolling your own engine tech there are some smart components to license.  Physics solvers, for example.  Epic uses middleware where we can.  Integrated Partners Program. 

 

Smart licensing: managing risks is key to game development.  Any external dependency is a risk.  Has the tech shipped before?  Shipping is where reality sets in.  Can you ship if they close their doors or fail to make promised updates?  Epic gives source code access to licensees have the option to fix ship blockers themselves. 

 

 

Yannis Mallat, Ubisoft Studios Montreal

Emotion and Innovation

 

Bambi.  Emotion Sells.  Bambi is 66 yrs old, 1942.  Not linked to technology. 

 

Ubisoft:  “Creating the best games of the industry”.  Want to sell a lot but before we can sell them we need to create them.  Mandate is not about building technology.  Tech alone doesn’t sell.  Statement in favor of innovation.  Our best bet is to innovate and provide emotion, that’s how they make great games.

 

So, how to innovate?  Three layers:  tech innovation, content innovation, tools innovation.  Tools are the missing link.  How do we provide the creators with the best tools to express their vision?  Next gen is content driven not tech driven.  Technology yes… but.    Why can the same engine be used for top-end games and mediocre games?  Does good tech = good games?  How many gamers by games for their technology.  Tech is important but it’s role is to serve the creative talent.

 

“Refactor the Renderer”  -- what does this even mean to non technical people?  This is not the right war to fight.  The game code that is not in the technology will be good enough to make the game good and different from competition.

 

Tools, tools, tools.  Developed with and for the creatives.  Execution not a barrier anymore.  Must be built in house!  Generic tools do not allow for creative ideas, at best they allow generic content for generic games.  Think about the CGI world – ask them about generic tools.  They build their own pipelines.  Tools are the translation of technology into innovation and emotion.  Code is not emotion.

 

Apple – not bought from tech, but from the emotion that it generates.  Nintendo – could you possibly have less technology approach?  Focused on innovation and the talent of their designers.  John McEnroe – greatest tennis champs ever, but did it all with a wooden racket.  All about the talent.  Racket tech to help people play generically.  Talent generates emotion.

 

Technology is not a deciding factor at this point anymore.  Talent, Innovation and Emotion are.

Always fun to see people I know really well in the industry getting recognition -- like winning awards and being on cool panels.  This one was quite inspiring, working with Ken & Greg in the past has been fantastic and I can't wait to see where they go next (and Ray is pretty inspiring as well).

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Ken Levine

Greg LoPiccolo

Ray Muzyka

Q&A Panel

 

Narrative.  All 3 games handle it in their own unique ways.  Were there doubts on pulling it off?  Bioshock had different goals than Mass Effect.  Tell as much of the story in the world and visually, as well as making it optional for the player.  Different levels – the player to delve deeply vs the average gamer just being about to enjoy it without taking a course about it.  How do we tell a story where much of it is optional, and much of it is suggestive rather than being spelled out.  All these games are different, from implied narrative to glorious hugeness.  All valid approaches, great that the industry is learning how to tell these stories in different ways.

 

Definition of what narrative is, is evolving.  Where is it going to be in 5. 10. 15 years.  Open possibility space vs closed possibility space.  Oblivion open, emergent narrative where players define their own narrative.  Bioware in the middle, flows but directed.  RB and Bioshock more directed, it is linear, tight and polished with a narrative flow.  How the expression of narrative – text, voiceover, but also pacing and gameplay.   In Bioshock you are a participant in the space to see the narrative unfold.  We know we succeeded before launch if the people who made it are all still having different experiences. 

 

Level of polish on the digital actors makes a big difference too.  Ultimately about these emotions and experiences.  This year at the awards it was about games of emotion, convey at a level that wasn’t sustained before. 

 

Convey narrative in different ways.  Expressed in different ways.  Narrative of story and characters, or of multiplayer, or of the community entirely external to the game.  Narrative of gameplay as it unfolds.  Progression and customization of characters to make it intimate and personal.   Narrative of combat (boxing game).  Exciting to see how many are reaching new levels of quality.

 

Civilization is a game with a great narrative.  No dialogue but “damn those Scots!”, the narrative that the player forms through their own gameplay.  Abstract but it is a narrative.  The more we move into spaces that are uniquely ours, the future lies there.  Narrative of character growth – everyone remembers the moments they have in Azeroth, growing their characters.  Narratives without words.

 

RB has loading screens and a map, in comparison to these big opuses with lots of words.  Pragmatic goal in narrative, to bond people together emotionally in a band.  Experience within the song working well, but wanted a toolkit to make a longer term emotional investment in the band.  So ripped off the RPG design tools and simplified them and put them in the band mode.  All about the emotion, to create that bond between players.  Because people understand how bands work they can use a lot of shortcuts with the loading screens, and simple choices about fans and where to go.  Ending up being enough.

 

Loading screens being personalized to reflect your own visual choices had an impact.  Wasn’t just arbitrary, player had participation in those loading screens.  “Well, it was all we had time and budget for.”  Building these little vignettes about being broke down in the desert with their van. 

 

Where is the line between taking suggestions to enrich the story, and making sure the story doesn’t go off into left field?  Went back and looked at the original designs, and they were totally insane, covering huge swaths of time.  So lots of paring things down, 5 characters into 1, removing notions altogether.  Every character in the game became an expression of an idea, a particular meme in the game.  Sander Cohen, the doctor in the first level.  Limit the amount of ideas but sell those ideas really well through focus.  Wanted people to be able to follow the story without cliffs notes.  An exercise in discipline.

 

Building a foundation between projects, trying to advance the art.  For Bioware these are difficult choices.  Collaborative, so hard to say where you are making the exact decisions.  Meritocracy of ideas, very humble and willing to change course.  Dedicated game writers help.   A lot come from linear media, and not everyone can make that leap.  6 months to a year of building the body of knowledge about the IP.  World has to feel real.  Most of the content ultimately created in 6 months to a year, the real work is creating the world.  Iceberg, 90% of the work never seen by the fans, they only see the tip.  The games resonate for a few reasons: activity chains and how they interact with the story.  Always seeking improvement on that narrative flow.  Expression comes from that foundation of knowledge, which makes it feel real.  That’s the key to why they resonate, there is a universe we really built.   Makes it ring true, even if it is just a small line.

 

Sculptors start with big piece of stone and they chip away.  Game creators have to build the stone first, make a giant rock then bring out your chisel.  Sometimes you ship with mistakes.  Usually the problem is that people don’t chip away enough.  Natural to want to protect your babies.  If you write it you want it to get to the audience.  Every artist needs an editor.  In the Thief days that was a big deal, fleshing out the environment.  But we had the toolkit so when people wanted to reach into the narrative space they could.

 

How did you decide how far to go with the music story experience in RB?  Do you see having more of an RPG experience eventually?  Kind of something they are debating right now.  Sticking with the T rating takes a lot of content right off the table about the rock and roll experience.  It’s a performance simulator not an RPG, so cautious of that.  But could see stretching it a little. 

 

Every game in a sense is an RPG, aren’t you always roleplaying in some degree?  Embrace it, let people aspire to things they cannot do in everyday life.  Bioshock is focused, but RB is fragmented – map doesn’t have to do with performance.  How much can go in there before it dilutes the experience?  Games are about a core fantasy.  But that was a problem in Bioshock, what was the core fantasy there?  The player being a cipher was a happy accident of never bothering to build the main character.  Who doesn’t’ want to be a tool in a failed objectivist utopia.  Maybe more about the everyman thrown into an environment.  Responding to the environment.

 

Marketing guys “who is on the cover of the game”. Do players think they are the big daddy?  An issue not having a person to hang the game on.  Bioware struggles with that too, ME one of the first games where they had a defined character, but that didn’t reflect the customizable character.  In the past focused on villains, which is a problem since you kill them off, and don’t always work as marketing focus.  Can be hard to tell a story if the player can be whoever they want to be.  All expressions equally valid.

 

Hard to do, requires a generosity of spirit.  Levine much more greedy / lazy want to write a specific thing.  Even harder for Oblivion, story is whatever you want it to be.  Astonished that it worked as well as it did. 

 

How do you wrestle with your message and telling it vs the T rating in RB.  How do you balance art vs commerce?  Bioware trying to think of both.  Core stakeholders: employees need creative passion, customers have to have some fantasy aspiration, and businessmen, have to be able to sustain that business.  Constraint is your friend.  You can make any kind of game about anything, and that can be paralyzing.  Having those constraints let you decide whether something serves the core or not.

 

 Someone hands you 20 million, you have a lot of responsibility to get that paid back.  You have to sell games ultimately, when 2 million people buy your games that indicates you are doing something right.  LG didn’t sell a lot of games but they were loved, but you have to find both.  Take that responsibility seriously. Empowering, keeps you honest about what you are making.  Are people going to look at this and say “OMG that so awesome”.  Maybe sounds stupid, but easy to get caught up in your systemic work.  Job is to amaze people.  If you amaze them they’ll buy the thing.  Empowering to be ambitious.  Not just selling, but to be inspiring.  Inspire the teams, inspire the people buying your game.

 

Q:  Everything we do is about story, literature about that in psychology.  Narrative is much broader than just words.  Social experience, so many things.  The notion of the unreliable narrator was very exciting and inspiring to the Bioshock guys.

 

Q: If you could change anything about your games, what would it be?  What kept it from happening?  RB: online band world tour, was just a resource issue.  Bioshock: underestimated how important narrative was going to be, that Ryan scene with nothing of that impact afterwards was a failure.  That mystery was really important to people.   Bioshock could have used some “make the great joke then get out”.  Fight Club wrap things up quickly once the mystery is out.  Bioware: shorten the phase of learning.  Favorite moment when the galaxy opens up, want to be able to start at that point more quickly. 

 

I admit I couldn't quite follow everything Matsuura-san was saying.  It was way more philosophical and futurist than the usual fare at DICE and so I think it went above a bunch of people's heads.  By far the highlight was a live performace at the end of "You and I" while Aibo and the weird rolling-iPod things danced.

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Masaya Matsuura

Ryo Watanabe

NanaOn-Sha

 

A Sense of Fun: Anyone Could Be Your Player One

 

1985: psy-s album with Sony music, disbanded in 1996

1996: Parappa hte Rapper

1999: vib ribbon

2002: IGDA board member

2005: Tamagotchi connection corner shop, 90% female / 77% elementary school students

2007: musika on the iPod

 

Associated with the music game genre, at the end of the day he’s a musician looking for a way to expand his art.  Music genre started in 1996 in US , grown incredibly since then   In Japan it is a genre all of its own.  Delighted to see the great surge of interest in the west lately with GH and RB and Singstar.  GH franchise 20% of all game sales last year.  Amazing.

 

Many games these days use orchestral soundtracks.  Nice, but isn’t it lacking in imagination?  Games are interactive, unlike film.  But music is basically the same in both.  Unimaginative forms will slowly die out as new forms mature.  Drastic changes in music already.  

 

History of music games still very young.  What is the way of growth?  Collaborating with great musicians is one way.  Hot female singer with sexy dance video is good even without the music!  Western success based mostly on licensed music, and we have to move beyond this.  What is the next paradigm? 

 

Most musicians create music in their own style.  Street musicians.  If music comes in at the end of the game as subordinate to the design, you cannot call that person a musician.  That is merely production.  Difficult to unite opinions of a large group of people, so some contribution is not reflected.  Programmers making casual games independently so they can be the creative source.  If passion becomes subordinate to other factors, game over. 

 

Music genre outgrowing itself and challenging us to expand its possibilities.  Music is mysterious.  Music reinforces culture (parties).  Music has memories and information attached which is difficult to separate.  Making music is an independent creative act but once in the world it is a shared entity, no longer under our control.  This is a hint to why music is so hard to define.  Look at children doing group music.  Children dancing together in Chad.  Even without victory as a goal there is enjoyment related to the pure conduct of the game.  Why do we engage in these seemingly meaningless actions?

 

“Postural Echo”.  Two friends talk informally, adopt similar body postures.  IF very friendly and share attitudes, this goes as far as to become carbon copies.  Not a deliberate imitative process.  Automatically indulging in postural echo as an unconscious action.  In a children are these more necessary for positive development?  Matching behaviors in real time.  Risk taking of positive emergence is necessary.  Not by judging merit but by adapting and behaving appropriately.  Play more enjoyable by having this sense – generates great fun?

 

Editing technique – single black frame causes audience to blink.  Pick this up automatically.  Same thing if your partner is a computer game.  Develop emergent forms of communication like postural echo with AIs?  Kismet project at MIT.  This could be important in the future.

 

Two entities attaining a mutual standpoint.  If unequal, emergence is restricted and instead you get negative emergence.  Too simple to divide into positive and negative.  Negative emergence brings about stress – war as an extreme example?  Regrettable to have so many games that promote negative emergences.  Maybe straightforward, but the future is not bright for the industry if this is all we focus on.  Physical attacks to establish superiority is a problem.  In 100 or 1000 years people will study our history.  What if it is written like “back then games were all about killing like gladiators of ancient Rome”?

 

Video games are an easy form of entertainment, all you need is the hardware and software.  But to keep entertained getting increasingly complex with small actions doing huge effects.  Failure to have actions of great responsibility in the real world have so little responsibility in game.  Better in the Wii – stronger the controller moves the stronger the bat hits.  Wii requires tighter connection between actual and virtual actions.  How can be improve on this?  That is the way to more advanced games.

 

Major Minor’s Majestic March: using the wii baton as a conductor’s baton.  Wii doesn’t give accurate data quickly.  Instead of focusing on rhythm based gameplay, let them control the tempo by waving the baton.  Deal with players getting bored by repeating the movement. 

 

“Tangible Experiences” – games moving out of the displays.  Look back at this era as the time when all the games were trapped behind the screen.   Wider possibilities make the word “game” insufficient to describe what we do.  Music about futuristic robot car and future possibilities.  Vehicle as extension of body image.  When computers ARE cars, interactive design becomes critical for maintaining  accurate control at speed.  Using music as a tool for this? 

 

“Rolly” music player like iPod that moves.  In movies, living things shown dying, but this is staged.  Make a distinction between real and staged events.  Robot dog being driven over.   Destroying actual Aibo is shameful misuse of virtual experience.  Of course it is different, everyone understands that Aibo is a machine, but it still deserves our respect as an entity with different sense than us.  Work environments should reflect positive emergence too.

 

As children grow they lose ability to draw very precise pictures.  As one part of brain develops you lose capability elsewhere.  When we explore new ideas we have to experience these new ideas.  Most other forms of representative media require previous expectations to understand the content, but this is not necessarily true of games.  Games can affect deep emotions, this is why they are fun and important.

 

Games rejecting a broadening notion as they become hyper competitive in specific areas?  Big inspiration from the West as growing up, would like to see more outreach from the West to the East.  Future generations enjoy the culture of others. 

 

No choice about listening, but players do have a choice about what games they load.  So we have to find a language that appeals to everyone.  Then it doesn’t matter who is your Player One.